as larks, if it is true that
larks are merrier than other birds, and Peepy-Snoozle and Tim,
mistaking the bright warm sunshine for another summer, I suppose, got in
the habit of being quite lively about the middle of the day as well as
in the middle of the night, instead of spending all the daylight hours
curled up like two very sleepy fairy babies with brown fur coats on, in
their nice white cotton-wool nests.

There was so much to do and to think of the first few days that I think
Baby forgot a little about what he had seen in the old curiosity shop.
Auntie, too, was too busy to give any thought to the picture which had
so taken her fancy, though neither she nor Baby _really_ forgot the dear
little face with its loving, half-merry, half-sad blue eyes. But auntie
had to help mother to get everything settled; and of course there was a
good deal to explain to the strange servants, for neither Peters nor
Linley the maid knew "lubbish talk," as Baby _would_ call it, at all,
and it was very funny indeed to hear Peters trying to make the cook
understand how grandfather liked his cutlets, or Linley "pounding" at
the housemaid, as Fritz called it, to get it into her head that _she_
didn't call it _cleaning_ a room to sweep all the dirt into a corner
where it couldn't be seen! Peters was more patient than Linley. When
Linley couldn't make herself understood she used to shout louder and
louder, as if that would make the others know what she meant, and then
she used to say to Celia that it really was "a _very_ hodd thing that
the people of this country seemed not to have all their senses." And
however Celia explained to her, she _couldn't_ be got to see that she
must seem just as stupid to them as they seemed to her! Peters was less
put about. He had been in India with grandfather, so he said he was used
to "furriners." He seemed to think everybody that wasn't English could
be put together as "furriners"; but he had brought a dictionary and a
book of little sentences in four languages, and he would sit on the
kitchen table patiently trying one language after another on the poor
cook, just as when one can't open a lock, one tries all the keys one can
find, to see if by chance one will fit. The cook was a very mild, gentle
man; he had a nice wife and two little children in the town, and he was
inclined to be very fond of Herr Baby, and to pet him if ever he got a
chance. But that wasn't for a good while, for Baby was at first terri